Employing is time consuming process

Small business entrepreneurs life is a hectic mess of professionalism and marketing that professionalism of yours, administration of for example company´s finances and developing for example the functions of the company´s products or services. Many of the self employed small company owners think that hiring an extra worker or an assistant would save money and time, but in many cases it means even more work, at least in the beginning of the employment since the introduction and the paper work hiring someone will cause.


When thinking of hiring someone the costs will play a big role as well, and the taxes. The benefit of the employing someone in regards the money it costs depends of course on the income and on the profit the company is making, and of course on how much time it will actually save and how much added value it has to the entrepreneurs own work. For the employer it is not simply the costs of the salary of the employee, but there are added costs from taxes and social security payments, health insurance and so on. In the salary of the employee you can add at least 40 percent of the costs to get the right expense.


Also the new payments in the accounting and the introduction of the employee to her work will take some time from the actual professional work. These can be however solved through proper recruiting and automatizing the whole salary payment. Many accounting companies offer these day electronically handled salary payments and electronic finance administration (in Finnish = sähköinen taloushallinto), in which the software counts and deals with money transactions. This can save actually some time and money as well. Employing can be useful if you are overloaded by work and profession which pays well.

Eco tips for office work

There is about 1,7 million office workers and millions of quarter meters office space in Finland. People spend most of their time in these spaces and in this sense office buildings are a big consuming units in regards for example energy and waste. Finding ways of making the office life more ecological can truly make a difference not only in being more environmental friendly but as what comes to money as well. Usually being ecological means saving in materials and energy and this way it can save a lot of money as well.


Probably the earliest ecological movement concerning office work was the idea of paperless office. This is realized in many practices of the office work – for example billing and payments can be done electronically, and the whole accounting (in Finnish = kirjapito)can be done on the computer screen instead of printing receipts and sending out paper sheet. Computers and internet have made it more easier to save paper and this way reduce the cutting down of the forests, but there has emerged an other end to this as well – computers use a lot of energy.


Office buildings are one of the biggest energy consumers around in working life in the urban environment when excluding big industry plants. Energy efficient constructions are a novelty of 2010´s and lot of office buildings are built in 70´s and 80´s. In those times there wasn´t lot of attention payed on the energy and especially for example the leakages of heating. However the new construction specifications which are composed in European Union and which will be valid in future in Finland as well will take these things into account. In old office building for example changing the windows will effect on energy consuming. The electricity bill can be reduced as well by simply remembering to shut off printers, computer screens and lights in the end of the day.

Electronic accounting eases up the workload

My late grandmother used to keep her finances in neat and steady order. In her later years, when she had quite poor health conditions, I used to help her with her daily groceries and do the visit to super market for her. She always got her purse from the drawer, counted carefully the money for me, gave the shopping list and then marked on her little blue notebook the amount of money she gave to me. And when I had the shopping done, she took the receipts, and wrote down every item and the price.


In later years, when my grandma had already gone into eternity, I sometimes missed especially her advices on keeping the finances in order. As an entrepreneur you however have much more of the traffic on you accounts and the manual, written down accounting is not probably the most practical way of keeping on track on credits and debits. And when you add the whole component of taxation into the accounting, which for common office worker and employee is dealt by the employer, you are already in the jungle of different kind of payments and costs, incomes and compensations.


Even if the records are kept on the computers and with the help of computers, the manual way of recording all the transaction traffic is a mess and demands even more organized manners than my grandmother used to have. She just run her personal finances with cash money only while the poor modern-day self employed entrepreneur has a whole universe of different kind of taxes and payments to take care of. Solution for the professional running into these problems are the accounting softwares (in Finnish = kirjanpito-ohjelma) and electronic accounting. That still leaves some work for the entrepreneur herself, but is anyway simplest method to keep the track on finances.

Paperless office is an ecological choice

The idea of the paperless office has been around at least since seventies but only now it is truly possible to realize an office environment where use of paper is reduced to minimum. Think of some big, international corporation – they receive thousands of job applications, their workers write thousands and thousands vacation announcements, money orders and bills and receive salary payment checks and order products, all on paper. This will produce tons and piles of sheets. In Finland one office worker produces approximately 7000 paper sheets annually, so moving into paperless office not only is an ecological choice, but saves money as well.


Many companies have already taken into practice to not to print everything, but to do as much as possible through internet connections, electronically and with the assistance of computers. City of Helsinki for example managed to reduce the amount of paper sheets per employee into around 3000 pieces in one year after taking the programme of paperless office into action. However, most of the reduce was result of the outsourcing of the printing and this way the paper consumption was merely outsourced to outside printing office.


The conditions for realizing the paperless office are already here. Documents can be drafted, shared and edited for example in a common office space in the office network and the bills can be send as official documents through e-mail. Even the accounting and salary payment can be done nowadays without using any paper – many accounting companies offer even electronic accounting (in Finnish = kirjanpito) services in which you can send and receive electronic bills and handle them wholly with an internet connection and a computer.